Collection of Roadside Inspection Information

I conduct compliance reviews on carriers and regularly hear discussions from these carriers in regard to their vehicles being stopped at various locations nationwide for inspections. The officers once they have checked the driver's paperwork and have taken a look at the vehicle and failing to see any violations have then allowed the vehicle to proceed with issuing any inspection reports. It seems that officers are only looking for vehicles which have violations and upon not finding any violations to document are allowing them to proceed without any documentations of the inspection or issuing a CVSA decal if the vehicle qualified for a decal.

This practice would affect a carrier's safety evaluation value on SafeStat for its roadside inspections and affect its overall SafeStat score. If the carrier is already high on the priority list for compliance reviews, this would keep the carrier high on the list if it only is credited with inspections reports which show out of service violations. This keeps investigators going back to the same carriers to be reviewed repeat ably, which might have corrected prior problems and not allowing them to concentrate on the carriers which need reviewed. It seems that some jurisdictions are using safety inspections as a means to issue a citation instead of using a citation as a means to promote safety. I am not suggesting that we still don't have vehicles operating without violations but that if a supervisor/officer needs to understand the significance of these inspections reports. It would also seem that this practice would violates some of the guidelines of CVSA.

It seems that if an officer had a better understanding of how their roadside inspections affect carriers standings and business that they might be more inclined to complete inspections reports even when no violations on a vehicle is detected. If they take the time to stop a vehicle and detained it, then an inspection report should be submitted. This may be a problem just on the officer's level or on the supervisory level or both. The officer feels if he doesn't list any violations on a report that his superiors might feel he is failing to conduct a good inspection and the same may be felt by supervisors that if no violations are noted that the officer is failing to conduct a good inspection. If this practice is occurring, which I feel is, then the violations and out of service percentages for some carriers will never decrease. This problem has been occurring for a long period of time and needs to be addressed, possibly through better supervisor and officer training.